Healthy Ever After

Okay, here’s a short one, one being project. In just over 2 weeks ¹ I have written, recorded, and edited a short YouTube video about ✨sleep✨.

A 2 week project is usually indicative of a sprint, we did something similar earlier this year about Canadian government. But this isn’t just a re-run, there’s one key difference between this project and that one. That project used the PLP staple of Project Based Learning. PBL is basically just a framework for going through a set of benchmarks, and coming up with some set outcome. Now, that’s all fun and dandy, but for this project we decided to take a quick departure from that to try out Challenge Based Learning.

CBL and PBL are pretty similar, and I’m still shaky on the formal definition of CBL, so I’ll just guide you through what we did.². In this case we had to come up with a “Solution” to the challenge of making a video that “Educates and persuades others to improve their health and wellness”. To do this, we had to connect to the “Big Idea” of either Mental Health, Physical Health, or Health Education. From there, we had to come up with an Essential Question. ³ Finally, we had to come up with a Challenge, related to the essential question, that we would act upon.

That’s the Engage stage done, first of 3. Even though it was first, I’d already messed up by doing the essential question before the big idea. Regardless, all was well and I was able to move on to the challenge easily, filling out the first row:

As I mentioned before, my video was about sleep. I’m not too sure if it fit under the hat of mental health, but again, didn’t mess me up too badly.

The next stage was Investigate, where we did all the research relevant to our Challenge. This consisted of coming up with Guiding Questions, and then a plan on how to answer those. Then we did the plan, and summarized all our research into the relevant parts. Boom, another row down.

With research done, the thing we had to do was plan the video! This meant making a Solution Statement ⁴ and making an Implementation plan. With a quick “Does it work” check in Evaluation, the Act stage was complete:

Ok, so I lied. Apparently you need to do more than just planning to make a video, so, I did that too. While I can’t put an epic montage in a text document, I can do the next best thing: a bullet-point list! So, here’s what I did to turn the plan into reality!⁵

• Write a script
• Try to shoot
• Realize I have no idea what shots to do
• Plan shots
• Shoot outside shots
• Start to shoot inside shots
• Go on a band trip ( it was very fun )
• Get sick
• Wait to get better
• Finish filming shots
• Start to edit
• Spend way too long making a VHS effect
• Spend way too long trying to remove a background without a green screen
• Finish video
• Have DaVinci Resolve crash while trying to render. Every. stinkin. time
• Crash fixes itself randomly
• Render in the wrong framerate
• Render in the right framerate
• Upload to YouTube
• Done!

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Yep, that’s it. The main mistake I made was not finishing all the filming before the band trip, but I didn’t really expect to get sick. Editing took longer than I expected too, but it did finish, so here’s the video:

About half of it I’m very happy with, both visually and narratively. The other half definitely needs some work, but I’d still give it a solid 60%, so that totals to around an 80% video in total. There was also an odd issue where I think it rendered it out at an interlaced framerate, which becomes very apparent when I move. I have no clue how it happened, or how to fix it, but I guess I should make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I’m interested in CBL, and I definitely want to get a bit more of a grip on it going forwards. It seems like a very move-move-move system, so I’ll need to make sure not to trip and fall behind. This is what we’ll be using for our Disney World project, so I’ll get another chance very soon. ⁶

That’s all for this post, hope you tolerated the video. I’m Finn, so long for now.